Coming up, Jonathan explores a Florida cave in search of a rare cave crayfish!
Welcome to Jonathan Bird’s Blue World!
I’m here on the beautiful Suwannee River in Branford Florida.
We rented a house here for a week of cave diving, here in cave country.
Tomorrow we’re going out with our good buddy Wayne Kinard from Amigos Dive Center and we
don’t really want to embarrass ourselves because none of us have been diving caves
in about a year.
I haven’t been in sidemount gear since last February so we thought maybe today we would
do like a refresher dive…go do a nice cave, and get up to speed, and get comfortable with
our gear again.
So I called up my friend Becky Kagan Schott who is an expert on Florida caves, and she
suggested that we go to Little River which is a really beautiful but a high flow cave—there’s
a lot of water coming out of it.
So that would make it a bit of a challenge and will give us a good excuse to work on
our skills.
So that’s the plan for today, we’re going to Little River and we’re going to check
it out.
Our first stop is Amigos Dive Shop, where my good friend Wayne Kinard has our tanks
full and ready.
We’re on an expedition today looking for a blind cave crayfish, which is a little albino
crayfish.
It lives in the caves, very rare, but the cool thing is, it lives to be 200 years old.
It’s only a half hour drive from the shop to Little River Springs.
This picture-perfect spring produces 55 million gallons of crystal clear water every day.
And it’s home to the elusive cave crayfish.
This is my favorite part of diving, when you get to carry your stuff!
We bring our tanks down to the water.
Then it’s time to suit up for an adventure.
Now how does this thing go together?
Finally Todd, Zach and I are ready to begin our dive.
I’m really excited because I have never dove this cave before.
But Zach and Todd have done it many times.
At the entrance to the cave, Todd ties his reel to a steel pin specifically designed
for cave divers.
This line is extremely important for cave divers as it points the way out of the cave.
A few hundred feet inside the cave, Todd ties his line off to the permanent guideline that
we will follow.
Soon we leave the cavern zone and head into a place of perpetual darkness.
Since Zach is an expert on this cave, he leads the way.
The walls of the cave show scratches from divers struggling forward in the high flow
conditions.
We are lucky that the flow is not too strong today.
While Florida caves are not ornately decorated like caves in some other places, the erosion
of the limestone creates an alien landscape full of interconnecting passages to explore.
You never know what’s around the next corner.
We’re having fun filming each other as we swim further into the cave, keeping an eye
out for the crayfish.
Finally, Todd spots a blind cave crayfish.
It looks like a miniature lobster, but since it lives its whole life in darkness, this
crayfish has lost not only its sight but its pigment.
So it’s a ghostly color.
Mission accomplished.
With the crayfish filmed, and having reached 1/3 of our air supply, we turn and begin our
trip back to the entrance.
The way back is much easier because we just go with the flow.
Back in the cavern zone, Todd removes his reel from the permanent line and spools it
back up as we ascend.
Up in the spring, we spend a little time filming the sunfish.
Then I spot a really cool freshwater flounder, also known locally as a hogchoker.
Even in a tiny pool like this, there are cool things to find!
We surface safely an hour after we started.
That was awesome!
Now that we’ve had a refresher dive, we are ready for our special expedition with
Wayne Kinard tomorrow at Peacock Springs.
Stay tuned for the next cave diving adventure!
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